Gimcrack speech | Horse Racing Free Tips

I wish I had met Paul Mellon. He does seem to have been a rather good egg.

Mill Reef was born the year before me and though I wasn't precocious enough to have enjoyed his racing career live, for some reason, since I started taking a serious interest in racing, he has long been one of my favourite horses. I think a lot of it has to do with Mellon himself.

Can you imagine a modern-day Gimcrack-winning owner writing a poem about his horse, as Mellon did for Mill Reef in 1970? That year was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the horse's success. Six Group 1 wins would follow at three and four, including victory in the two most important races of all: the Derby and the Arc.

I was thinking of Mill Reef the other morning as I always do on visits to the National Stud. His name plaque is still visible, and the stallion yard is made extra special for having his statue there en route to the paddocks. Its plinth bears plenty of clues as to the kind of man Paul Mellon was. One side states the horse's breeding and achievements and, in a particularly nice touch, credits John Hallum, who looked after Mill Reef when the horse was in training with Ian Balding at Kingsclere, and George Roth, who did the same during his stallion career. Again, I wonder how many other owners would have thought to acknowledge the key people in the horse's life in so permanent a manner. On the other side of the plinth is Mellon's poem from his Gimcrack speech:

Swift as a bird I flew down many a course.
Princes, Lords, Commoners all sang my praise.
In victory or defeat I played my part.
Remember me, all men who love the Horse,
If hearts and spirits flag in after days;
Though small, I gave my all. I gave my heart.

Mellon's legacy to racing has more substance than this delightful whimsy. American by birth, the confirmed Anglophile was a significant benefactor to the British Racing School and Royal Veterinary College and, pleasingly, his English racing colours live on through the Kingsclere Racing Club thanks to him having bequeathed them to Ian Balding. So too does the story of Mill Reef through Lord Oaksey's wonderful book and the Albert Finney-narrated film Something to Brighten the Morning.

Racing and breeding have changed, in some ways for the better, in some ways not. While interviewing Peter Kavanagh of Kildaragh Stud recently this was brought to mind again, as he rued the demise of the owner-breeder.

Things are different now, and people breed horses differently, too, with much more of a commercial imperative. This is not a bad thing per se, but one can't help but wonder if we are losing some of that pure love for the horse – call it sentimentality if you like – as well as a proper understanding of the traits of families in the process.

A treasured possession in our house is a collection of four leather-bound scrapbooks compiled by Sir Victor Sassoon and detailing every mention of his Guineas and Derby winner Crepello in newsprint. For obvious reasons, scrapbooking is a dying art, except at Heath House, where, during Christmas week, Sir Mark Prescott will have faithfully consigned his favourite clippings of the year to a new book.

So much is lost, too, in our digital life, as convenient and environmentally friendly though it undoubtedly is. Sure, we can look up most things online (and of course TDN has a handy daily archive stretching back years) to see the results and ratings, and watch the replays over and over. But there is something rather thrilling about being able to read in yellowing, faded newspaper clippings just what Peter Willett or Roger Mortimer or John Hislop or Dare Wigan thought of Crepello at the time, all adding their own informed takes on his pedigree. All that would have been lost to this reader without those scrapbooks.

Hislop, later the owner-breeder of Mill Reef's nemesis Brigadier Gerard, said in the Sporting Life of June 11, 1957, “At no time has our bloodstock been in greater need of a boost, and Crepello's pedigree holds out every hope of his proving a classic sire in the old tradition.” Maybe things haven't changed that much at all.

The two best horses we saw on the racecourse in 2023 are now both safely ensconced in stallion barns: Equinox (Jpn) at Shadai Stallion Station and Ace Impact (Ire) at Haras de Beaumont. We've heard plenty of late about how Japan is running rings around the rest of the breeding world when it comes to producing top horses, but another way in which the country is a global leader for the sport is in its fan engagement.

When speaking to Japanese journalist and broadcaster Naohiro Goda at Tattersalls just after Equinox's retirement from racing had been announced, he mentioned a JRA-planned retirement ceremony, which took place the week before Christmas at Nakayama. “The fans will expect to be able to say goodbye,” he said. Quite right too.

Let's copy this idea. After all, we had one for Frankie Dettori on Champions' Day and he isn't even retiring. One or two such ceremonies for the truly special horses would be a great way to show our appreciation. Because really, all the sales, the politics, the raceday concerts are just sideshows. Horses in full flight are what draw us all in, whether we are punters, racegoers, breeders, owners, trainers or jockeys: they are the one thing we all have in common.

Though we have this unifying element, even better is that we all love different horses for different reasons, and it's not just the great ones. That, too, when we are breeding Thoroughbreds in their thousands, is an important message that should not go unheard.

Every Christmas we receive a card from a lady who owns one of the former residents of our yard. He's 22 now and he wasn't much cop as a racehorse but he has brought years of fun to his rider on the hunting field in Devon. He's one of many now well into their twenties and proving hugely useful in different spheres.

From a personal perspective, one of the only occasions to have brought proper joy following the death of my father in February was our horse Dereham winning at Newmarket for the second season in a row. It was an inconsequential race in the grand scheme, but to win at our home track with a homebred was special. I don't think the Jockey Club will be planning a retirement ceremony for him, but I might start to lobby for one if he wins that same race for a third time in 2024.

Dereham is plainly no Mill Reef, but he is small, he gives his all and, as horses do for so many of us who love this sport, he has kept me going when spirits have flagged.

The cyclical nature of racing is such that, no sooner have we rued the retirements than we are looking forward to the next big thing. I am hoping that Big Rock and Auguste Rodin continue to be big things and, as every year, continue to hope for a Triple Crown winner. So come on City Of Troy, let's be having you.

Before that, however, I would like to thank you for reading TDN and wish you a happy, successful and peaceful new year.

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The cleverest Premier League football club tycoon is also a devoted racehorse owner committed to “expanding” his racing empire. QED: put Tony Bloom in charge of UK racing and tell him to replicate the miraculous transformation of his Brighton & Hove Albion FC.

One day last week Bloom addressed the Gimcrack dinner as an owner of Lake Forest, the Gimcrack Stakes winner. A couple of nights later, Brighton finished top of their Europa League group to cruise through to the last 16 in their first ever European campaign.

To Bloom, owning and breeding horses is no mere hobby. At York he signalled his intent to play for big stakes on the Flat (over jumps he owns the two-time 2m champion chaser Energumene). This may turn out to be just another mathematical challenge for Bloom's restless mind. If he can beat the plutocrats of English football, why not try the same formula against Coolmore and Godolphin? You can bet your stud farm those giants will be watching him.

But how might the sport itself benefit from a large injection of street smarts? Racing folk tend to disdain external Messiahs. Bloom though isn't an outsider. He has strong form in racing and especially betting, where he made his fortune. It's tempting to wonder how a football club owner who has outflanked nation states, oligarchs and private equity hotshots would fare in a poker game with racing's warring stakeholders.

The crucial point about him is that he took Brighton from the verge of extinction 26 years ago to the top six in the Premier League by drawing on his world-class poker decision-making skills – and the best data processing model in British football. Bloom buys low and sells high, always replenishing the squad with young talent picked out around the world by algorithms built by Starlizard, an analytics firm whose work wipes the floor with the research carried out by other clubs.

Bloom loves racing almost as much as he loves the Seagulls, as Brighton are known. His Gimcrack speech will have excited breeders and trainers. Bloom owns Lake Forest with Starlizard's head of football, Ian McAleavy. Radars buzzed at Tattersalls a fortnight ago when Get Ahead, a half-sister to the 2,000 Guineas winner Chaldean, was sold to First Bloodstock for 2,500,000 gns. First Bloodstock is registered in Brighton in McAleavy's name.

The questions multiply. What if Bloom and McAleavy develop a data model for racing as good as their football prototype? Are there gaps in the knowledge of trainers and breeders begging to be filled by revolutionary algorithms? I can hear breeders crying out indignantly. Do these football folk think there is a clue unreached by centuries of evidence sifting and trial and error?

Fair question. But then it's also worth reminding sceptics that Bloom is so far ahead of the game in football that he sold one player (Moises Caicedo) to Chelsea for more than the original cost of Brighton's handsome 30,000-seat Amex Stadium. Caicedo cost £4.5m and went two and half years later for £115m.

[Bloom's] opinion carries the weight of one whose
work in football is envied across the world

To Bloom business is never just a game. He told his audience in York that he and McAleavy were determined to pursue “more successes on the flat in the near future. That will mean investing in more horses, expanding our stable and, through that, in our own way, making a bigger contribution to UK racing.”

Lots of clever people have theories about how racing can attract new disciples. At York, Bloom backed Premiersation, under which, he argued, “a shorter, more impactful fixture list, will be much easier for new, lesser-committed racing followers to keep pace with.”

His call for a two-week closed season in a 12-month cycle of relentless betting shop fodder with the aim of “focusing attention and building anticipation” for a new campaign will struggle to get past bookmakers and the collectors of racing's meagre levy. But his opinion carries the weight of one whose work in football is envied across the world. “As the saying goes, sometimes less is more,” he said. “And I believe that a few tweaks to schedules here and there, and a small reduction in the sheer volume of racing, will bring more and greater benefits to the sport as a whole in the UK.”

So: less racing, more emphasis on the big events, a break between seasons and good relations with the bookmaking industry. These were the tips from a racehorse owner whose club was playing in the lower leagues at a converted municipal running track when he took over.

If racing isn't in the market for creative thinking from 'outside' the sport then it really ought to be. Bloom has made himself pivotal to the growth of the English Premier League as the world's favourite football division while rewriting the rules about how players are scouted, bought and sold. We wait to see whether he can repeat that trick with bloodstock (he has made a decent start).

Mick Channon spoke recently about how many rich owners enter racing expecting success on the scale they achieved in business, only to leave with reduced wealth and a thousand-yard stare. A talent for one trade isn't necessarily transferable to every other. Bloom won't be making many mistakes. At a recent club function, I practically begged him to buy Brighton racecourse to save it from stagnation. He didn't sound keen.

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